Are You Spending 1,000 Hours Preparing for Your Next Job?

Many ways of making a living that once seemed safe can become endangered remarkably quickly (as anyone in the photography, publishing or recording industries can tell you). People inside are often the least able to see what’s happening on the outside. Your industry or company could be on the cusp of a disaster and you may not know it. If disaster were to hit, you’d like to believe that you could find another job. Well, as the cliché goes, hope is not a strategy. Especially in this job market.

Here’s what we believe, surveying the landscape: It would take something like 1,000 hours — and maybe a lot longer — to recover from a forced career change.

We aren’t talking about the cumulative time for the job search itself — of sending out resumes, networking and the like. We’re talking about 1,000 hours of retraining in essence to prepare for another job. All the job hunting you will have to do will be on top of that.

Let’s do a little sloppy math — just for illustration. Your situation will be different (but we bet it will be close.)

We will start with those of you in technical fields. In 1966, students arriving at an engineering college were told that they would be obsolete in seven years. Back then, some people estimated that information was doubling every seven years — and by 1973 there was, according to some, twice as much information as there was in 1966.

In 2012, some estimate that information is doubling every 18 months and that the doubling time is shortening such that it will be doubling in a matter of days or weeks by the end of the year. That’s taking Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s bold prediction (now known as Moore’s Law) that the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years to a far new level. But to be fair, Moore made what was seen as his seemingly wild prediction 47 years ago.

The trend is clear even if you don’t buy the exact math. It certainly seems we are running harder and harder to keep up with the required knowledge in our specialized fields. What would you actually have to invest in order to stay in this race? In this race, information is the tiger and there doesn’t seem to be an end to how fast the tiger can run. But remember, the good news is that you don’t have to outrun the tiger. You simply have to outrun your competitors, people like you who are going to be looking for a job, once their industry becomes obsolete.

You might start with a simple rough assumption, for example, that three-quarters of your college education will stand you in good stead — after all, the basics rarely change — for your entire life and that one-quarter is subject to erosion, and that most all of that erosion occurs over a five-year period. (If you wanted to quibble and say it is only two-thirds of the basics that won’t change and a third of everything will keep evolving, we won’t object.)

Said another way, you would have to recover one-quarter of a college education every five years. (It could be better, it could be worse. You get to make your own estimate.) Depending on how much you studied and how much time you spent in class, this quarter time might amount to 300 hours a year — that’s about six hours a week. Even with these rough calculations, you can get an idea of how much training you should be receiving on your current job — just to stay current. Hopefully, your job is providing that sort of development in the normal course of your day-to-day work, plus any company-sponsored training.

If you keep at it, you should do fine. You get 300 hours of new and refreshed information and knowledge every year, while the old stuff decays and becomes less relevant. Over four years you’ve lost 1,200 hours and refreshed 1,200 hours, so you are okay — for the present. Obviously, you are going to have to keep doing this for the rest of your career. And equally obviously, what you are learning is going to have to be cutting-edge stuff. (For what it’s worth, we are huge fans of life-long learning.)

Now you might say that your career hasn’t and won’t require specialized information like an engineer’s does. And you may be right. It’s certainly true for jobs where your employer can train you quickly, and some firms like Starbucks are really good at this, assuming you want to work at Starbucks.

And it may be true that if you can sell or manage one thing, say at a retail store, you can sell or manage any similar thing, at another retail store. (But this wouldn’t be true for an Apple retail store or a computer store or a phone store or…. Most everything these days requires some sort of background and expertise in what you sell or manage.)

If you’re working 60 hours a week, then you’re probably not spending another six hours on your next move. You’re betting on getting ahead in your existing company or industry and that it will be there to take care of you. Maybe that’s not such a wise bet.

Our suggestion? Find something that:

1.) You care about — it will make it easier and far more enjoyable to put in the time

and

2.) Might be a safety parachute

Start investing three hours a week in it right now. Yeah, we know that the rough math shows you need at least six, but let’s be honest. From a dead stop to six hours is rather like losing 20 pounds — the number is so big that you won’t start. And more than anything, you need to start. So start small. Trust that as your interest develops, it will be easy to work up to six hours.

In the best of all worlds — i.e. you get to keep your current job — the new education and skills you gain will make you more energized and allow you to do your job better.

And if the worst happens — your job and maybe your industry go away — you are far better off than all those people who did not make an investment in themselves.